Hundreds of protected areas are under pressure from Scotland’s massive deer herd. Most agree deer numbers must be controlled to protect the environment, but are split on what should be done.
Edinburgh University students were “interrogated” by police at their desks over posters featuring Palestinians killed by the Israeli military, prompting dozens to complain.
Unsafe levels of faecal bacteria were recorded at dozens of Scotland’s best beaches this summer. Swimmers and paddlers could be at risk, but officials insist water quality remains high.
Loch Long on the Clyde has been contaminated by radioactive waste from the UK’s nuclear bomb store where old water pipes have repeatedly burst and caused floods, files released after a six-year secrecy battle reveal.
Internal documents obtained by The Ferret from the Scottish Government’s environmental watchdog disclose that radioactive water drained into the loch, which is popular with swimmers, divers, kayakers and fishers, after a major flood in 2019.
According to the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa), the pollution happened because the Royal Navy failed to properly maintain a network of 1,500 pipes at the Royal Naval Armaments Depot at Coulport on Loch Long in Argyll.
The flooding was caused by “shortfalls in maintenance” and resulted in “unnecessary radioactive waste”, Sepa said. Plans to replace the ageing pipes at risk of failing and spreading radioactivity were “sub-optimal”, it warned.
Sepa was concerned about a “lack of asset management” at Coulport, and at the nearby naval base at Faslane, by Helensburgh, the home port for submarines armed with Trident nuclear missiles.
The documents released by Sepa suggested that up to half of the components in use at Coulport were “beyond design life” in 2020.
The revelations were described as “shocking” by one expert, who condemned attempts to keep problems secret. Campaigners said that poor maintenance at a nuclear weapons base was “deeply concerning”.
The Ferret reported in May 2025 that there had been 12 nuclear incidents that could have leaked radioactivity at Faslane since 2023. The Ministry of Defence said the incidents had “actual or high potential for radioactive release to the environment” – but it refused to give any details of what happened.
Rob Edwards
According to the newly released documents, there was a pipe burst at Coulport back in 2010 and then two in 2019. One burst in August 2019 released “significant amounts of water” which flooded a nuclear weapons processing area, became contaminated with low levels of radioactive tritium and drained into Loch Long.
After an internal investigation and a Sepa inspection, in 2020 the Royal Navy promised 23 actions to prevent more bursts and floods. It accepted that its lack of preparedness had caused “confusion”, “a breakdown in access control” and a “lack of communication of the hazards”.
But in 2021 there were two more pipe bursts, prompting another inspection by Sepa in 2022. Progress on completing the 23 remedial actions “had been slow and delayed in many cases”, Sepa said. “The events have highlighted shortcomings in asset management across the naval base.”
A navy review in 2020 assessed “vulnerabilities, defects, corrosion” in “several systems” at Coulport and found that “about 50 per cent of the components reviewed were beyond design life”. This was “not what would be expected from a mature asset management system”, Sepa said.
The Ferret first made a freedom of information request for files on radioactive problems at Coulport and Faslane in 2019, and then again in 2023 and 2024. But despite multiple reviews, most files were kept secret for national security reasons, after Sepa had consulted the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
The secrecy was overturned, however, by the Scottish Information Commissioner, David Hamilton, in June 2025. He ordered Sepa to release most of the files, saying they threatened “reputations” not national security.
The release was delayed by another intervention from the MoD in July, citing “additional national security considerations”.
On 5 August, Sepa released 33 files to The Ferret, with the names of some specific plants and dates redacted. They disclosed for the first time the problems that the Royal Navy had been having with pipes bursting and flooding parts of the “Trident Special Area” at Coulport.
This is one of the most secretive, sensitive and secure areas in the UK. It includes the UK’s store of nuclear warheads for loading onto submarines, a weapons processing facility and missile bunkers.
There have been nuclear weapons stored there since the 1960s. It is also where warheads are regularly replenished with the radioactive gas, tritium, which helps to make nuclear explosions more powerful.
According to an email from the Royal Navy to Sepa in 2020, the “flooding event” in August 2019 was caused by “a failure in a flexible coupling in the low temperature hot water system” in the Trident Special Area.
There were over a thousand of the couplings throughout the area’s “fluid and air systems” that were “being operated outwith their design life”, the navy said.
According to a Sepa inspection report, the August 2019 flood released up to 15 cubic metres of water in a building that “had been used for 30+ years for carrying out processes that involve tritium”. The facility “has an open drain that is believed to drain directly to Loch Long,” Sepa said.
The levels of tritium contamination in the water were “very low”, Sepa said. But it concluded that there were “shortfalls in maintenance and asset management that led to the failure of the coupling that indirectly led to the production of unnecessary radioactive waste.”
Sepa pointed out that water was not sampled until the day after the flood, when most of it had drained away. It was not discovered to be radioactive until ten days later.
Another pipe burst in September 2021 “resulted in a flood of a different area which contained radioactive substances”, said Sepa. The released documents give fewer details about the three other bursts in 2010, November 2019 and July 2021.
The Ferret reported in November 2024 that emissions of tritium from Coulport to the air doubled over six years, rising from 1.7 billion to 4.2 billion units of radioactivity between 2018 and 2023. The MoD declined to say what caused the increase.
Rob Edwards
David Cullen, a UK nuclear weapons expert from the BASIC nuclear think tank in London, described the repeated pollution incidents as “shocking” and the attempts to keep them secret as “outrageous”.
He said: “The MoD is almost 10 years into a nearly £2bn infrastructure programme at Faslane and Coulport, and yet they apparently didn’t have a proper asset management system as recently as 2022. This negligent approach is far too common in the nuclear weapons programme, and is a direct consequence of a lack of oversight.”
The Scottish Greens regarded the revelations as “deeply concerning” and called for “full transparency and accountability” from the MoD.
“There are few sites as dangerous and where an accident or shoddy maintenance could have such potentially catastrophic consequences,” said the party’s co-leader, Patrick Harvie MSP.
Because they are military bases, Coulport and Faslane are exempt from pollution rules that govern civilian sites. But Sepa said it was committed to ensuring the bases operated “in accordance with standards equivalent to those in environmental regulations, to protect both the environment and the public.”
All radioactive discharges from the two sites, along with assessments of the environmental impacts, were published annually. “Based on these assessments the risk to the environment from effluent discharges is of no regulatory concern,” Sepa told The Ferret.
An “extensive replacement programme for components” had been undertaken by the Royal Navy, it said. Sepa was “satisfied” that Coulport and Faslane had made “substantial improvements to asset management and maintenance”.
Sepa added: “Based on the improvements made and the information currently available, Sepa considers the programme to be adequately progressed and embedded.”
The MoD insisted that it placed the utmost importance on its responsibilities for handling radioactive substances safely and securely. “There have been no unsafe releases of radioactive material into the environment at any stage,” said a spokesperson.
“We frequently engage with regulators who report there is no significant impact on the environment or public health and are supportive of an open reporting culture.”
The files released by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency about pipe burst at Coulport are available on DocumentCloud.
This story was co-published with the Guardian. Cover image of Loch Long thanks to iStock/JoeDunckley
Hundreds of protected areas are under pressure from Scotland’s massive deer herd. Most agree deer numbers must be controlled to protect the environment, but are split on what should be done.
Edinburgh University students were “interrogated” by police at their desks over posters featuring Palestinians killed by the Israeli military, prompting dozens to complain.
Unsafe levels of faecal bacteria were recorded at dozens of Scotland’s best beaches this summer. Swimmers and paddlers could be at risk, but officials insist water quality remains high.
Footage of farmed trout suffocating, haemorrhaging, and being beaten with batons in a slaughterhouse has prompted an official complaint to a government regulator.
